


Procedure

by Rin_the_Shadow



Series: To Turn Spark [9]
Category: Transformers (Unicron Trilogy), Transformers: Armada
Genre: AU to Transformers: Armada, Allusions to PTSD, Alternate Universe, Friendship, Gen, Red Alert is a good doctor, Starscream has issues, Surgery, adjusting to Autobot life, allusions to past abuse, autobot medical procedures, discussion of cruel and unusual punishment, reassurance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-07
Updated: 2018-12-07
Packaged: 2019-09-13 11:52:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16892073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rin_the_Shadow/pseuds/Rin_the_Shadow
Summary: Set immediately after the end of "Mars," Red Alert takes Starscream back to the medbay to fix the damages he received on the mission.





	Procedure

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings are in the tags.

This was becoming almost routine. As he led the seeker back into the medbay, Red Alert was uncertain of whether or not he should find this alarming. A part of him suspected he would become highly adept at repairing seekers before the war ended.

Starscream followed Red Alert in silence, something which the medic found much less surprising than he would have previously thought. He had learned in their time together that he could be incredibly vocal one moment, and then completely silent for the next megacycle. And vice versa, as well. There were many factors that could affect which he would be in a given moment, and Red Alert had started to learn to piece together which went with which.

As they entered the medbay, he motioned for Starscream to sit on the medical table. Although he knew there would be surgery involved—multiple reconstructive surgeries, potentially—there was no point in asking him to be on the surgical berth longer than he needed to be. Some patients needed more time to prepare themselves, while others needed to minimize whatever time they would have to mentally tear themselves to shreds, and Starscream definitely tended towards the latter.

“I’m going to begin by scanning you,” he explained. “I’ll be comparing it to your previous framing and circuitry scans to determine the best way to go about this.”

The seeker nodded, training his optics on the scanning device. Of course, he still wasn’t familiar with many aspects of Autobot medical technology—because of limited supply or limited access, Red Alert had opted not to question—and with the medic working at his back, he would be particularly skeptical. In hindsight, he was surprised he hadn’t protested the first time he’d taken framing scans.

It was a simple enough procedure as the beam swept over his wings, spinal structure, severed cannons, and the remains of his linking bay. The scans were always the easiest part.

As he returned to his computer and attached the scanner, he heard the seeker shift behind him. A few command codes later, the scan comparisons flashed onscreen. In the reflection, he saw Starscream wince and start to reach behind him as if to confirm it. Red Alert fixed him with a look and he withdrew his hand, scowling at being caught.

There were some circuits he would be able to reconnect, but there would be others he would have to take out and replace. He opened a third set on the screen to see his inventory—what he would have to construct, and what he would be able to pull from.

The cannons would have to be constructed. That was a given. He would need to use Swindle’s scans to figure out how to rebuild his linking bay, as they would have molded to each other over time. Swindle’s file was linked to Starscream’s, so it was simple enough to pull up the image. He would have to use the data forge, since some parts were unique to Starscream’s physiology. Not for the first time, he was grateful to the scientists who had developed it.

As he converted the earlier scans to construction view, he saw Starscream move as if to speak, and then stop as if he’d thought better of it. Red Alert couldn’t help but wonder what he had been thinking. He could never quite tell if it was going to be a comment or question, and found himself caught off-guard more frequently than he cared to admit.

But he would leave it to him to bring it up on his own. He turned to speak to his patient. “I’m sure you’re aware that this is not going to be as simple a process as your previous surgery.” He was almost surprised when he didn’t retort with some scathing remark. “I’ll be reconstructing almost the entirety of your null canons, and I will have to remove parts that survived in order to properly reattach them. As far as your linking bay, the first half of the procedure will be to prime the circuitry, and then I will attach the reconstructed bay directly. This is technically two processes, and will take between four and six hours to complete. You will also have to stay in the medbay overnight and keep it immobilized while it fuses.”

There was a slight chance it wouldn’t take, and if that was the case, Red Alert would have to work quickly to weld in a stronger fusion patch before it could break away and create further complications.

He wouldn’t like this next part. “You’ll have to be in stasis lock for these procedures. Reattaching entire body structures, especially recently forged, is an unpleasant process in and of itself, and on top of that, I will have to reopen parts of your plating structure that have already begun to heal. I cannot in good conscience have you online for that, even numbed.”

At the mention of stasis, Starscream had stiffened, yet he refused to comment. Seeing the tension in his frame, Red Alert continued. “You have my word as a medic that I will not give you any higher than the recommended dosages for your size, and I will have Longarm monitor your vitals. If anything goes wrong, he will correct it, or we will abort, and then stabilize you. We _will not_ allow you to offline.”

He was gripping the sides of the tables, optics still watching the screen, but not truly seeing it. “Is there something wrong?” Red Alert asked him.

The seeker startled, glancing back to the medic, and then starting and stopping several times more.

“I’ll admit…I don’t see why you’re doing the full procedure now,” he started speaking as if he was still deciding the words as he spoke them.

Red Alert found himself puzzled by this. It was only protocol, after all. It made far less sense not to. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

“If you don’t want to waste your efforts, you should wait. Whatever you do, I’ll probably just reopen it in the brig.” The seeker looked away, but his tone conveyed that this was a given. Nothing unusual, just another protocol. And after all, why go under the scalpel twice?

“The…brig?” For a split second, nothing made sense, and he racked his memory banks for something that would explain it.

Fortunately, the seeker decided to help him along. “Standard protocol for insubordination,” he offered. Again, nothing unusual, though the rigidity of his frame conveyed just what he thought of this “standard protocol.”

Red Alert couldn’t mask the split-second expression of shock that washed over his features. Starscream picked up on it almost instantly, and in his own expression was the realization that he’d said something he shouldn’t have. He started to correct himself, then hastily looked away, gripping the table hard enough to leave dents.

“No, you haven’t…I was caught off guard, that’s all,” Red Alert spoke, still flustered. He regained his bearing, focusing quickly on the situation at hand. “I don’t know precisely what happened on your mission, but Jetfire seemed to think the situation was recovered. While I am sure Optimus will want to speak to you about it, the brig isn’t something that’s prescribed as penalty around here.”

He could see the confusion in his expression, the minute widening of optics and the shift of the jaw as he attempted to process what he’d heard.

“More than likely, you’ll be assigned to monitor duty or data organization,” Red Alert continued. “But close confinement, especially for fliers, is considered cruel and unusual punishment. It isn’t used anymore.”

But there had been dark times in the past—Red Alert had heard plenty during his mentorship under Ratchet. It had mostly been used for prisoners of war, though reports of officers stripped of rank suggested there had been exceptions. The old medic had more than a few things to say about it himself, and had been one of the chief advocates in its discontinuation as a practice. Optimus Prime’s appointment to leadership had no doubt sped that process along.

“Is it?” There was a faraway note in his voice, yet he seemed present.

Red Alert wouldn’t pretend he knew what he was referring to. Is it cruel and unusual punishment? Is it not still in use? So he responded with what he knew. “As a medic, I could not condone its use. You have my word that it will not be used for you.”

He nodded once, still refusing to meet his optics.

“I’m going to prepare the data forge. Are you going to be all right?” He kept his tone even.

Starscream’s head snapped up, looking both confused and annoyed. He almost expected him to snap that he didn’t need any sympathy, but a second later, something else hit and his optics widened. “You have a data forge?” he asked, excitement carefully hidden.

Red Alert stood up. “It helps with more extensive repairs, particularly off-world where space and exact parts may be in short supply.”

He was almost perched on the edge of the table by this point, though he visibly tried to fight it.

Red Alert was tempted to ignore it, to begin the procedure and move everything along as quickly as possible. Yet he couldn’t help observing that he’d never showed such interest in anything here before. It made sense, he thought. After all, he’d claimed to have designed the Forge 15 scrambler. It made sense he would be intrigued. “Would you be interested in seeing it work?”

There was no verbal response, but the slackening of his jaw and the minute twitch of his wings betrayed his answer.

“I can permit you to observe, since it’s for your procedure.”

The second Red Alert had finished speaking, Starscream was beside him, trailing alongside as he sent the construction data to the forge and moved from the examination room. It was a little strange, he had to admit, as his mind drew a comparison to the Mini-Cons that usually trailed behind _him_.

He’d watched the process in almost complete silence, only breaking it to ask a question on parts of its functioning, or the connections between the construction scans and the molding of the pieces. Did it have other uses outside of medicine? Could it be used in construction of other things? He had been especially interested in the cooling process, and how that could be managed in such a short amount of time without damaging the structure, and yet _still_ leave enough heat to work as a point of attachment when it needed to.

* * *

When Longarm arrived to monitor the stasis lock, and they moved to the surgical berth, Starscream had hesitated, understandably reluctant to return after a decent period avoiding it. But Red Alert was able to convince him with relatively little persuasion. He resisted the anesthetic initially, even as Red Alert reminded him he would not let him offline.

The medic worked quickly, bending back plating where he needed to, replacing and reconnecting wires, heating connection points in the plating and armor just enough to meld properly into the new parts. In these moments, it was always tempting to let himself go into autopilot, yet he knew the dangers that would pose.

Longarm chirruped out information and Red Alert adjusted accordingly.

The connection to one null cannon resisted attachment, and the medic had to remove and patch a few places to fit it securely.

When he had finished, he first had Longarm run a final scan to make sure everything was correct, and then he administered a numbing agent. It would be unpleasant for the seeker when he first woke up, but he would do everything in his power to minimize his discomfort.

They brought him back online, making sure to give him the space to awaken without feeling crowded, but remaining close enough to act if he tried to get up prematurely. Red Alert restated what had been done for the procedures, and once he was stable, they moved him to a recovery berth and set the temporary harness to keep everything stationary.

“I will be logging the data from this,” Red Alert said. “But if something is wrong, you can use the call switch to alert me.”

“Right,” he answered, slurring slightly from his systems’ efforts to filter out the anesthetic.

The medic left the recovery chamber, but before we went to update his procedure notes, he found his hand moving to the datapads nearby.

It was barely a minute before he made his way back to Starscream, but in that time, Swindle had already slipped in and sat beside him. For the time being, he was quiet, but the half-hearted scowl on Starscream’s face made it clear he’d commented on something he was trying very hard to be annoyed with.

He looked up upon hearing the medic reenter. “Back so soon?” he asked, a smirk creeping into his expression, as if he had all kinds of remarks prepared, but couldn’t decide which one to use. In some ways, Red Alert was glad for the effects of the induced stasis, since it meant he didn't have to deal with that right then.

“Since you will be staying overnight, I didn’t think it would be fair to ask you to do nothing but rest.” He suspected if he did, he’d have to chase him down before the night was over. “You were interested in the data forge, and so I thought this might be useful to you,” Red Alert said, placing the datapad on a small counter within his reach.

Optics widened before he caught himself, “Really?” And then the smirk had returned, a wry twist that was half a challenge and half a game at this point. “You want to trust a Decepticon with your data forge?”

 _Don’t start this again,_ Red Alert thought as he suppressed a sigh. “Sooner than I would trust you immobilized in the medbay overnight with nothing to occupy yourself.”

His helm tilted downwards to shadow his expression. “Heh…paranoid Autobot,” he muttered, nowhere near as spiteful as he could have been.

But as Red Alert exited the room, he was already opening the datapad. He heard Swindle chirping, and Starscream interrupted him with a stern, “Don’t start it.” The effect was somewhat ruined by the groggy edge to his voice from the drugs, but it didn’t seem like the Mini-Con was going to point it out.

Satisfied with his work, Red Alert returned to his desk to begin the procedure log from the surgery.

**Author's Note:**

> Parts of this were inspired by some dialogue at the end of the 4th episode of Transformers: Armada about the "detention" cell, particularly since even Demolisher seems to find it excessively harsh. I wanted to touch on some of that here.
> 
> There was another one I had been planning before this, but since this one would take place first, I decided to finish and edit it first.
> 
> Red Alert occasionally amuses me, because I feel like when I write in his voice, half the time, he's analyzing everything, and the other half, he's just very direct and like "and that's it." 
> 
> In any event, please let me know what you think!  
> ~Rin


End file.
